News.me: “News.me is a small team based out of betaworks in New York City. We build applications that improve the way people find and talk about the news. – We have an iPhone app, an iPad app, and a daily email that deliver the best stories shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook.”

News.me: “News.me for iPhone delivers the must-read news from your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Reading the news has always lent itself to a social experience: from the breakfast table to the water cooler to the classroom. But on the social web we’re no longer just ‘readers’ – we are all publishers, curating and distributing links to our own audience of friends and followers. – Yet when it comes to finding news on Twitter and Facebook, we hear the same complaint over and over again: ‘there’s too much stuff!’ At News.me, we want to help people wade through the chatter to find the news that truly matters. – News.me for iPhone analyzes all the links shared by your friends to find only the most relevant news for you. News.me is smart – it does the hard work of finding the right news so that you don’t have to. Each article is then presented in a beautiful stream that displays the publisher, headline, photo, and most importantly, what your friends are saying about it.”

RWW: “News.me launched its free iPhone app this morning, which introduces Facebook integration, a saved offline reading list that syncs with the iPad app and Instapaper, and new, simple social dynamics of its own. It digests the links shared by Twitter and Facebook contacts, checks Bit.ly for their popularity, and presents a list of the top news stories in a clean, readable environment. … I hate ‘It’s-the-this-of-that’ tech news stories, but I hope this comparison is meaningful: What Instagram is to photos and Path is to personal moments, News.me is to news. It’s a one-thumbed way to connect with people over the news of the day.”

GigaOM: “News.me has an interesting history: It started as a skunkworks project inside the New York Times – an attempt on the part of a couple of NYT developers to come up with a way of filtering Twitter based on a user’s social network. The team formed a partnership with the New York-based incubator and venture firm Betaworks (creator of services such as the Bitly link-shortener and Chartbeat) and then News.me was eventually absorbed into Bitly and the New York Times wound up with shares in the company.”

TC: “A bit unusually, the part of the app that you’ll use first may actually be the least interesting. In some ways, the new app is just a redesign of what News.me was already offering through its iPad and email products – a list of news stories, pulled from your Facebook and Twitter streams, then curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, and presented with the context of the initial tweet or Facebook comment. … Although the company has been focused on the iPhone recently, and even though the iPad app has been less successful than the email digest, it sounds like Levine plans to add the new features to the iPad eventually.”

AT: “The goal isn’t to just be yet another news service – the idea is that you’re more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing (compared to a standard firehose of news coming from every direction), which is why you might want to use a service that analyzes your feeds for shared stories. ‘We’re bringing you the best of your Twitter and Facebook in a streamlined interface, along with a venue for you to converse about news with your friends,’ News.me developer Robert Haining told Ars on Thursday. … The News.me iPhone app also offers a Reading List feature, which is pretty much what you would expect. Like Safari’s Reading List or even Instapaper itself, you can mark stories from your News.me feed to read offline.“